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The April 2012 Tutorial Discussion
The April 2012 Xara Video Tutorial on Xaraxone.com has arrived!
Gary Bouton takes you through the process of creating an outdoor sign, from concept, to typography, to drawing it in Xara Designer, to exporting it for personal printer and for commercial printing. How good does that get?! If you have a garage sale (don’t tell Gary), a bake sale, a sports league sign-up, or other service, event, or product you need to advertise on a sign, sign up today for Gary’s Xara TV tutorial for April 2012.
Check out the video, Designing a Sign With Xara Now!
Then come back here and show us your signs!
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OOPS! Should work now.
Thanks for the prompt heads up Steve.
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Barabara ... what have you got against Pink Flamingos? :D
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Well It's definitely working now (or maybe I know the magic word! :)) ) Very enjoyable Gary, I never noticed the tiling option in Acrobat Reader before so I have learned something already! :)
Here is a sign layout I put together. I included a line that is often included on Yard or Garage Sale signs around here NEB (No Early Birds) or seriously the ardent yard sale junkies would be camped on your doorstep while you are still in your PJs!
I'm not a huge fan of pink flamingos either, tell you what Barbara, I'll distract him in the Typography forum while you make it disappear! ;))
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Re: The April 2012 Tutorial Discussion
Love the slanted and reversed text, not so much the bullet between the Save text. I would stretch the backend of the arrow past the end of the italicized Please to balance out the arrow.
Hah, we always go early even to NEB designated sales...
Mike
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But that bullet drew your attention didn't it ;) You are right however about the back end of the arrow (that was sloppy of me)
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The good thing about ugly stuff in your yard is, that no-one will steal it. ;)
And here is my add, we don`t have yard/garage sales etc here, it is basically a yearly thing
at queensday when you are allowed to sell in the streets (without tons of permits)
Here it is.
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@Ankhor, very well reproduced. Me, I'd have tightened the spacing, so I had more room to make the text larger, but it's a fine example overall and thanks for watching the tutorial and participating!
The keys to effective sign-making are:
1. Clutter-awareness. When everyone is doing the same thing, you do something different. So if everyone is doing silly signs, you do a serious one to stand out in the crowd. Similarly, if everyone is using a dried-out laundry maker to make a sign, you follow the tutorial steps and make a professional one.
2. "Color", also called "density". Evaluate your sign from different zoom levels to see whether the average eye will be able to follow the text from a distance. Text that's crammed too tightly can't be read, and spindly text with too much air around the words is hard to follow by the average reader and they'll ignore it.
3. Hierarchy of your message. Levels of importance: what's the most important sentence? Make it your headline through the use of font boldness and font size (and choice of font). Do you all realize why I avoided a fancy typeface? Most important=Bold and large, least important=consider not even typing it, if it's that trivial! But do use a smaller point size and lighter weight.
4. Use position and very simple design elements to get attention. The "all sane offers..." line takes up approximately the same area as the arrow. Two messages at once, eh? And also "Save$" is small, through repetition it becomes more important visually.
You play with the elements until you get the ideal balance.
Barb doesn't hate plastic lawn flamingos; this was an amateur theater moment. In fact she bought several when a chain store here—Ames—closed years ago. When a neighbor does something tacky like buy a huge brightly colored playset for the yard, highly visibly, highly ugly and the kid isn't even old enough to use it at 8 months (!), The Boutons retaliate with a Flamingo Swarming, all birds facing the neighbors' house on the edge on our yard.
We entertained the idea of a "flocking" as it's called, but couldn't think of a neighbor to flock overnight, without incurring property damage after they discover the gifters.
I'm surprised everyone picked up on the flamingo! I try to limit myself to one piece of nonsense (okay, 20) per tutorial, and the real gag I thought was one of the garage sale items in the computer simulation:
Attachment 88846
Ah, well,
—gare
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Here in the U.K we have carboot sales, where you can buy just about anything, well nothing illegal that is. :D
Stygg
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Gosh, you have a fast getaway car with the loot in the trunk, and Carboot Sales don't have anything illegal?
stygg, you got main point, and then secondary point staged beautifully, but it's not a selling composition yet. Reconsider how small the rest of the text is? Balance? Larger, condensed font?
Also, this would be a color print? You have white, teal, and black. Couldn't you print black on teal and eliminate the white?
Just my 2 pence. Outstanding work very quickly, stygg!
-g-
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Just tried the black on teal and it looks really good, but not to sure about leaving the background white, it's a bit difficult to choose a background colour to go well with teal and black, have a look and suggest, if you don't mind Gary.
Stygg
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Re: The April 2012 Tutorial Discussion
Hi stygg—
Using a color, in a production sense—real printing, not designing for the screen—means paper color. IOW, you only have the luxury, unless you want to spend £££££££ advertising an event that's by it's nature a cheap one, to print solid black on whatever paper stock you can use.
This is why I recommended in the video that you buy some fluorescent paper (neon, Day-Glow, they sell Astrobrite's at out local tech/business supply store). Because you're not going to print this in full colour...it's too expensive to do it commercially for this sort of event, and you can't/don't want to use an inkjet, because you KNOW it will rain the day before and the inkjet prints will run.
I'd like to to give this another go, please, stygg. You were at a disadvantage because you thought you could use more than one colour.
Strip the info down to the essentials—you have tow "selling" lines when you only need one in the Xara file, and play with the text. Pretend you have snippets of text on a physical piece of cardboard on the kitchen table. Shuffle the pieces around. Then take into account that in Xara you can scale text, something you can't do with printed text.
This is truly a design challenge, and also an advertising challenge.
The fewest words, the most attention-getting design.
The winner gets a lawn flamingo.
-g-
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Just kidding! ;))
I'm pretty sure you won't like the OOB part, but otherwise I think I get the idea. Well at least I paid attention.
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I'm going to take everyone's colors away from them, Wizard!
The tutorial is based around a (goofy, but) real-world assignment: to make an oversized sign for some sort of event.
I like the flamingo sale, Larry.
And you used pink, black, and mint on a white paper.
That's three colors, man, and if you did spot color you'd pay a fortune to get the sign printed. You'd need to use SWOP 4C to make the sign affordable to print.
I'm truly not out to bust anyone; but the tutorial is start to finish about printing an affordable sign yourself, with tiling pages, assembled in your garage.
You resources dictate what you can do here.
Color is not part of the design, or the message.
My Best,
Gary
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
zaphodeist
Barabara ... what have you got against Pink Flamingos? :D
Gare, I did the pink flaminigo thing because of this post and because of Barbara's reaction in your video. OK I'll get serious.
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That's a good looking sign mwenz.
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@Mike—
You're really, really close to a winner, Mike.
"Everything must go today"...lose it, no one will read it at that size.
I read in order of importance: yard sale, and more, 131 your street.
Good prioritizing.
@Larry
I know.
Funny.
Now get down to work.
:)
It's my job to be the forum clown, okay?
You can be the magician, and Frances can be the princess, and Mike's a cowboy.
-g-
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Funny thing that line. In version one "Everything..." had greater prominence. Once I rearranged things, it it shrank down to 50pt on that tabloid-sized sign.
Good catch.
Take care, Mike
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OK I got serious. So here is one with no color.
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I've gone straight for the jugular, big and bold no frills, in yer face, if that does'nt catch your eye well, I'll unload all the loot from the car :D
Stygg
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@ Larry—Silly as the sign is, you're pretty much there.
@Stygg—
The following is a general criticism, and I've marked up your design somewhat, but please do not take this as a personal criticism, okay? It's truly not. I feel from the feedback here that I need to teach some more stuff about dtp, page layout, and such. That the sign tutorial didn't hit all the points. This is me learning to teach better from everyone's input, and it's just as valuable as what members learn from the tute itself.
First, in dtp, there's something called page color. If it's too dense, it gives the reader a headache eventually, and if it's too light and spindly, it makes it difficult for you eye to follow from word to word. In both cases, the page color fails. This page color thing applies to short text outdoor signs, too. You achieve page color by 1.)choice of font (bold, condensed, serif or sans serif, and so on...see our tg Fonts & Typography forum for invaluable details on this stuff), 2.) Size of font, 3.) leading—the space between lines of text, and Xara has the feature up on the Infobar to tighten and loosen leading.
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So what does page color (or density) look like in a successful and unsuccessful sign? Sorta like this:
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Stygg, what I'm missing from your sign is 2% organization, 3% innovation, but other than that, you're real close.
Here's what I did to and for the sign, and I'll explain below the whys:
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1.) You needed to disproportionately scale your headline and the sales point inside the arrow to make the density of the elements more artistic and fit within the overall design better. Unusually, I discourage designers from dragging on text every which way, but sans serif typefaces can withstand distortion better than a serif font such as Times New Roman. The viewer's eye doesn't immediately tell them, "Oh, the designer screwed up that typeface!" with sans serifs than it does serif fonts.
2.) I see running Pound Sterling symbols across the top as a waste of message space, and I'd say the same of $$$$$ across the top. Perhaps as an artistic border, but my original garage sale sign said "SAVE" across the top, and actual message, not just a suggestion that the even involves dollars.
My version adheres closely to the original garage sale sign, but you see what I did? I made the top of the reversed out headline into a bunch of tyre treads. And played on the fact that a Pound Sterling symbol looks a little like and "L", in the same way we Yanks use a dollar sign instead of an "s" in advertising. $ALE!
++++++++++++++++++++
This is for everyone, I'm not picking on stygg, please everyone read and understand this:
There are cardinal sins committed every day with signs, that has to do with punctuation and grammar:
• The use of several exclamation marks suggests that if the business owner shouts loudly enough, someone will buy the product. One exclamation mark is sufficient for stressing a message; often a headline is adequately emphasized with no exclamation at all. It is redundant to cast a headline in all caps followed by several exclamation marks.
• The use of quotes is for quotations, not for emphasizing a phrase. When a designer puts quotation marks around “BEST” , it creates in the reader’s mind the suggestion that the retailer is speaking euphemistically. For example, when someone writes, “Get that ‘antique’ out of my parking lot in 15 minutes,” they aren’t actually referring to your 10-year-old car as a valuable antique, but rather as a piece of junk to which they’re referring euphemistically or sarcastically. The word “BEST” in quotes will surely be interpreted by anyone with writing skills as, “They really aren’t the best deals; they mean something else.”
• An apostrophe, as far as I know, is only used on three occasions. 1.) When making a contraction out of two words, as used in Don’t run with the scissors and It’s silly to dance with an alligator. 2.) When describing the possessive state of an object, idea, or whatever, as in Gary’s post, Larry’s flamingo, and so on. 3.) When you drop a character from a word, example: Nothin’ to it! An apostrophe is not used to separate two characters, and it should not be used reflexively to separate the second-to-last character and an “s” that follows.
Don't sell yourself short and don't make yourself look less intelligent than you are in print.
Sermon for today :)
Gare
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Cheers Gary for all that information and images. I never knew or relized, just what makes or breaks something so mundane as a poster, you sort of think throw a few lines together and it will do but not the case I am finding out. There's more to it than I thought. I must admit I don't use text or fonts very much but it seems I should brush up on these and also get some fonts you mentioned in the vid. and in your postings. I've downloaded your xar file and Jpeg images, time to get some learning done. :D
Stygg
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Re: The April 2012 Tutorial Discussion
Posters are only mundane if they aren't designed well! :)
Look at all the neat blacklight posters the Fillmore West and other places had during the mid 1960s for Jefferson Airplane and Hendrix.
The message met their audience at the time, and I'm trying to encourage tg members to use Xara in a design sense. The best illustration on Earth is going to get ignored if you use a tacky frame around it, and similarly, a good idea will get lost in a poor layout.
Now, superficially, this is not a "fun" garage or boot sale, as fancy fonts are simply inappropriate for the tone of the sale. It took me years (okay, decades) to realize that fun typefaces aren't what drives commerce, and a good designer knows when to put on a "formal font" attitude, and reserve the fun design stuff for ice cream ads and vacations in the Bahamas, you know? Appropriateness is key to good design.
This is important stuff, I'm happy you're taking all my writing in with a constructive spirit implicit in the delivery, and yes, you DO use text a lot, stygg!
What did you use to respond to my post? :)
Fonts are just the way we dress up words. And you don't want to dress your message up and send it out without carefully crafting your idea's "wardrobe".
That audience will say, "Your sale is ugly and your mom dresses your message funny!"
Or something like that.
I'm outa here for a few days. Someone unrealistically wants a design done for money they advanced me.
-g-
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Ooooh I get to be a princess, I like that ;)) I even have my own Prince William! (well he may not really be royalty but he's a prince to me!)
Here is a second one from me, I decided to use an old advertising principal: Less is more.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
angelize
Ooooh I get to be a princess, I like that ;)) I even have my own Prince William! (well he may not really be royalty but he's a prince to me!)
Here is a second one from me, I decided to use an old advertising principal: Less is more.
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How much do you want for the sink Princess :D I like your second less is more drawing Francis. Just finished two more so tell me what you think before Gary gets back. This poster tut. is more demanding than all the previous ones.
Stygg
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It's much improved, Stygg. You got yourself advertising for an event now (and make the date larger!).
I'm only popping in, and my apologies because I n eed to be elsewhere for a few days, and I'd prefer the "in for a penny, in for a pound" approach to teaching. IOW, you don't have my undivided attention, so I feel as though I'm short-changing you by simply posting "nice work."
Let me pick up our discussion on layout and design on Monday the 23rd. You feel free to discuss among yourselves, but I can't provide "quality time" in until after the weekend, cool?
-g-
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Well I didn't beat Gary but I will give my opinion on your work Stygg:)
I like the "Deals on Wheels" that's good I would stretch the words carboot sale a bit to fill a bit more of the reverse bar, and lose the reverse wheels on the right one. Remember Less is More :)
Like Gary said,Make the date and entry fee lines bigger, this is a sign that will be seen from a moving vehicle, Important info needs to be big so they have time to read it quickly. The Idea with this (and with any advertising), is to a) Grab the viewers attention and b) feed them the important bits first.
I didn't find this tutorial demanding, just a bit too much like real work! ;))
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Hi Francis,
thanks for the input, much appreciated and more like work is what I meant by demanding but enjoying as this is quite new to me all this text layout and using different fonts to make the design just so. Anyway I've altered my carboot sale yet again, so please have a look. By the time I get this right the carboot sale will have come and gone :D
Stygg
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Looking much better, Stygg.
And thank yourself for not blowing this tutorial off.
This is "Thinking the Big Picture" Time. This is not fancy, this is not elegant, this is the daily staple of designers, this sort of signage.
And we can see that there's more to it than a casual observation yields.
I'm trying to get our membership to look at the Big Picture, and get to examining stuff one might take for granted. And signage is susually in the background of a scene because it's typically poorly designed.
So if you can take something that seems boring, and turn it into an attention-getter, how much better a magician could you call yourself, and rightfully so?
For decades I've been taking stuff others find boring, and make the stuff shine by applying my artistic eye.
Getting paid to do art for a living. How much better does it get? :)
-g-
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Nice tutorial Mr.Bouton!
Cool trick to split page with adobe reader...
Marc
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Thanks, Mark.
Actually, Xara could do this if the engineers wrote the feature into its print engine. Aldus PageMaker had tiling, CorelDRAW has always had tiling...it's nice that Acro Reader and Pro have it, but it certainly would save a step to be able to print directly from Xara.
-g-
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Re: The April 2012 Tutorial Discussion
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gare
Thanks, Mark.
Actually, Xara could do this if the engineers wrote the feature into its print engine. Aldus PageMaker had tiling, CorelDRAW has always had tiling...it's nice that Acro Reader and Pro have it, but it certainly would save a step to be able to print directly from Xara.
-g-
And while they "are" messing around with the print and or PDF engine, perhaps increasing max page size to equal a PDF's 200" as-installed limit. (Actually, a PDF's size limit is in miles--yes, miles. But I would take 200".)
Mike
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You want results? Write the above into the "Dear Xara" area of tg, Mike.
My own gripes are way more than 200" long, even at 8pt.! :)
-g-
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Tried to get the spacing more equal, increased the text size slightly and added the frills to the rectangles, hoping it adds to the attension getter :D
Stygg
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Shortcuts in Xara for symbols
I realize I asked viewers of the April tutorial to use Alt+0149 to add a centered period to the sign, and this extended character command works in all applications, where the font you use actually has a centered period in it; some fonts do, others don't, depends on the font creator.
But there's also shortcuts in Xara—if you can remember all the shortcuts in all of your programs—and I've listed them right here. In Xara, after you've clicked an insertion point on the page with the Text Tool :
• Bullet= Ctrl+Alt+B
® Registered symbol= Ctrl+Alt+R
™ Trademark symbol= Ctrl+Alt+T
© Copyright symbol= Ctrl+Alt+C
Now, if these symbols are too large, avail yourself of the Superscript button on the Infobar to make the symbol smaller and then use the Baseline buttons or fields on the Infobar to adjust the vertical position of your symbols.
My Best,
—Gary
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Just had to drop my version in as well. I felt that a splash of colour can add that extra dimension.
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Oh one other thing, always make sure there is more space at each end of the sign than there is between each word (space is a virtue, so use it). Having your text stretched out to the extremities makes it look as if it is stuck to the sides of the sign and the line of text then becomes disjointed (one of those unwritten rules of sign layout) also do not mistake sign design with sign layout they are two different things. There are many strict rules of sign layouts so one day I will post these, so for now please see attached.
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